Poor John Updike. Poor New Yorker. The Great Depression Once Again

Oh, this is sad. Really sad. Depressing. And pathetic. It is really too bad that the New Yorker gave Amity Shlaes's book about the Depression, The Forgotten Man to John Updike to review. A competent editor would have chosen a reviewer who knew economics and history. But Updike is lost from the start:

Laissez-faire Is More: [Shlaes tells us that the 1929] crash preceded an underlying problem, deflation, caused by not enough money in circulation as banks failed and shut their doors; a number of dollar-starved communities—Salt Lake City; Ventura, California; Yellow Springs, Ohio—issued their own scrip, while Presidents Hoover and then Roosevelt supported policies, like the gold standard, aimed at a nonexistent inflation...

We need to stop right there. Roosevelt abandoned the gold standard. That Updike thinks that Roosevelt spent the 1930s clinging to the gold standard to control "a nonexistent inflation" is the first sign that he has lost the game of intellectual three-card monte Amity Shlaes is playing with her readers. If Milton Friedman were here, he would blow the whistle at that point.

Updike goes on:

[T]he gravest problem, as Shlaes sees it, was government “intervention, the lack of faith in the marketplace.” Both Presidents tried to lift wages, when letting them sink would have liberated businesses to start hiring and resume business as usual. Business knows best...

Once again, Milton Friedman would blow the whistle if he were here. The main thing reducing the stock of money was bank failures. The main thing causing bank failures was falling prices of all kinds--of real estate, of consumer goods, and of labor. More of what Milton Friedman's teacher Jacob Viner called "unbalanced deflation" would have produced an even deeper depression.

If only Updike knew this. If only Updike knew that nearly all economists--from Milton Friedman to Ben Bernanke to John Maynard Keynes to John Kenneth Galbraith on left--believed that further and faster deflation would have made the Great Depression worse! Here's John Maynard Keynes's argument: "Changes in Money Wages" http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ch19.htm. It was written in 1936, and still reads very well today. But nobody told Updike.

Hoove... was a dynamo... he favored government intervention, as long as it didn’t violate his sense of the Constitution, and sought control over economic events that would, according to Shlaes, have gone better if left alone.... Shlaes pursues her thesis through the thirties, few heroes emerge, and the most highly placed two are not apt to figure in many liberal pantheons: Calvin Coolidge and Andrew Mellon. Coolidge... is presented as a kind of Zen saint, a pillar of inaction.... [Shlaes] underlines Mellon’s honorableness, private generosity, and public spirit...

But she doesn't tell Updike that at the bottom of Mellon's personality was a pronounced social-darwinist streak, a belief that you had to be cruel to be kind. And Updike, of course, doesn't know. So he cannot quote Herbert Hoover's retrospective judgment of Mellon, that the policies Mellon had convinced him to follow made the Great Depression much worse:

[T]he “leave it alone liquidationists” headed by [my] Secretary of the Treasury Mellon... felt that government must keep its hands off and let the slump liquidate itself. Mr. Mellon had only one formula: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” He insisted that, when the people get an inflation brainstorm, the only way to get it out of their blood is to let it collapse. He held that even a panic was not altogether a bad thing. He said: “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people”...

Updike forges on, lost in the swamp, so lost that he is unable to protest Shlaes's libel that that Roosevelt was practically a fascist and her argument--argument--a very serious argument that has never been made in such detail or such care--that Roosevelt wanted to make the government boss people around because he couldn't use his legs:

Shlaes, in a bold stroke of psychologizing, lays the hyperactivity to “the restlessness of the invalid.” She goes on, “Like an invalid, the country took pleasure in the very thought of motion.” More ominous was Roosevelt’s totalitarian tendency: “His remedies were on a greater scale and often inspired by socialist or fascist models abroad.”

Updike watches Shlaes make the claim that that communist Roosevelt hired other commies as New Dealers:

One of Shlaes’s chapter-length detours deals with a junket... to investigate and report on conditions in the Soviet Union.... [T]he economic commentator Stuart Chase.... Stuart Chase upon his return wrote, “Laissez-faire rides well on covered wagons, not so well on conveyor belts and cement roads.” Collectivism was the inevitable direction. After all, Chase wrote, “why should Russians have all the fun remaking a world?” The poisoned chalice was passed around...

But then she doesn't:

But “few New Dealers were spies or even communists,” she reassures the reader....

At the end of his review, Updike tries to fight back:

[T]he Depression slogged on, ending only in 1940, as the government decisively hiked defense spending.... My father had been reared a Republican, but he switched parties to vote for Roosevelt.... The impression of recovery-—the impression that a President was bending the old rules and, drawing upon his own courage and flamboyance in adversity and illness, stirring things up on behalf of the down-and-out—mattered more than any miscalculations in the moot mathematics of economics. Business, of which Shlaes is so solicitous, is basically merciless.... Government is ultimately a human transaction, and Roosevelt put a cheerful, defiant, caring face on government at a time when faith in democracy was ebbing throughout the Western world. For this inspirational feat he is the twentieth century’s greatest President, to rank with Lincoln and Washington as symbolic figures for a nation to live by.

A better New Yorker editor would have chosen a reviewer who at least knew what an aggregate demand curve was. Here's my take:

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/arnold_kling_vs.html: I, at least, think that as far as recovery was concerned the macroeconomic good done by the New Deal vastly outweighed the structural bad. Any reasonable counterfactual involving no New Deal that I can see has things a good deal worse in the middle and late 1930s than they were in our reality.

But there is an argument to be made that an even better New Deal would have been possible, and ought to have been attainable.

Had Milton Friedman been special assistant to and whispering in the ear of Fed Chair Marriner Eccles in 1936-1938, he would have successfully headed off Eccles's boneheaded idea of raising reserve requirements on banks. Then the late 1930s would have been a much happier time. Had FDR given his baton in 1933 to trustbuster Thurman Arnold rather than to cartelizer Hugh Johnson and had the initial round of the New Deal increased rather than decreased the degree of competition in the American economy, then... well, the neoclassical part of my brain thinks that 1934 and 1935 would have been somewhat happier--but the Fundie Keynesian part of my brain thinks that Hugh Johnson's NRA was irrelevant because aggregate demand was a much bigger problem then than aggregate supply....

The New Deal essentially dusted off and implemented the unsuccessful Progressive Era program for the reform of American finance that had been pushed by the likes of Louis Brandeis during the 1900s and the 1910s. And Louis Brandeis was definitely on the side of the upwardly-mobile and the smart and technically competent, as opposed to the side of old wealth and new thrift.... Financial markets function well for the economy only when they do a good job of seeking out and transmitting information.... This requires that people be incentivized to seek out and uncover important pieces of information by being able to profit handsomely from doing so--which requires that there be a bright visible line between what you can do and what you can't, between legitimate research and illegitimate insider trading. The SEC as born in the New Deal has always found it relatively difficult to draw such a bright visible line....

[On the other hand] financial markets also function well only when they mobilize great masses of savings from scattered individuals by giving them confidence that their investments are liquid in that they can be bought and sold at a fair price.... Smart financial regulation attains a point of balance. There is... a general worry that the system the New Deal has left us pays too much attention to the desirability of a level playing field for buyers and sellers, and not enough to the desirability of having truly informed buyers and sellers....

[L]et's not lose sight of the fact that even badly-handled as it was, really-existing deposit insurance [implemented during the New Deal] was a mammoth improvement over no deposit insurance at all. I think that that is a good thumbnail summary of the entire New Deal: badly-handled, but a vast improvement over the preceding system and over the politically-viable alternatives--with the exception, I would argue, of Agriculture Support and the NRA, which did little if any good at immense long-run cost...

Ben Bernanke's analysis of the role played by unstemmed financial panics, industrial bankruptcies, and bank closings is Ben Bernanke (1983), "Nonmonetary Effects of the Financial Crisis in the Propagation of the Great Depression," American Economic Review, 73, (June) pp. 257-76 at google scholar >http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&client=safari&q=Nonmonetary+Effects+of+the+Financial+Crisis+in+the+Propagation+of+the+Great+Depression&btnG=Search>. Ben has a nice speech about money, gold, and the Great Depression http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2004/200403022/default.htm.

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Poor John Updike. Poor New Yorker. The Great Depression Once Again

Oh, this is sad. Really sad. Depressing. And pathetic. It is really too bad that the New Yorker gave Amity Shlaes's book about the Depression, The Forgotten Man to John Updike to review. A competent editor would have chosen a reviewer who knew economics and history. But Updike is lost from the start:

Laissez-faire Is More: [Shlaes tells us that the 1929] crash preceded an underlying problem, deflation, caused by not enough money in circulation as banks failed and shut their doors; a number of dollar-starved communities—Salt Lake City; Ventura, California; Yellow Springs, Ohio—issued their own scrip, while Presidents Hoover and then Roosevelt supported policies, like the gold standard, aimed at a nonexistent inflation...

We need to stop right there. Roosevelt abandoned the gold standard. That Updike thinks that Roosevelt spent the 1930s clinging to the gold standard to control "a nonexistent inflation" is the first sign that he has lost the game of intellectual three-card monte Amity Shlaes is playing with her readers. If Milton Friedman were here, he would blow the whistle at that point.

Updike goes on:

[T]he gravest problem, as Shlaes sees it, was government “intervention, the lack of faith in the marketplace.” Both Presidents tried to lift wages, when letting them sink would have liberated businesses to start hiring and resume business as usual. Business knows best...

Once again, Milton Friedman would blow the whistle if he were here. The main thing reducing the stock of money was bank failures. The main thing causing bank failures was falling prices of all kinds--of real estate, of consumer goods, and of labor. More of what Milton Friedman's teacher Jacob Viner called "unbalanced deflation" would have produced an even deeper depression.

If only Updike knew this. If only Updike knew that nearly all economists--from Milton Friedman to Ben Bernanke to John Maynard Keynes to John Kenneth Galbraith on left--believed that further and faster deflation would have made the Great Depression worse! Here's John Maynard Keynes's argument: "Changes in Money Wages" http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/general-theory/ch19.htm. It was written in 1936, and still reads very well today. But nobody told Updike.

Hoove... was a dynamo... he favored government intervention, as long as it didn’t violate his sense of the Constitution, and sought control over economic events that would, according to Shlaes, have gone better if left alone.... Shlaes pursues her thesis through the thirties, few heroes emerge, and the most highly placed two are not apt to figure in many liberal pantheons: Calvin Coolidge and Andrew Mellon. Coolidge... is presented as a kind of Zen saint, a pillar of inaction.... [Shlaes] underlines Mellon’s honorableness, private generosity, and public spirit...

But she doesn't tell Updike that at the bottom of Mellon's personality was a pronounced social-darwinist streak, a belief that you had to be cruel to be kind. And Updike, of course, doesn't know. So he cannot quote Herbert Hoover's retrospective judgment of Mellon, that the policies Mellon had convinced him to follow made the Great Depression much worse:

[T]he “leave it alone liquidationists” headed by [my] Secretary of the Treasury Mellon... felt that government must keep its hands off and let the slump liquidate itself. Mr. Mellon had only one formula: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.” He insisted that, when the people get an inflation brainstorm, the only way to get it out of their blood is to let it collapse. He held that even a panic was not altogether a bad thing. He said: “It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people”...

Updike forges on, lost in the swamp, so lost that he is unable to protest Shlaes's libel that that Roosevelt was practically a fascist and her argument--argument--a very serious argument that has never been made in such detail or such care--that Roosevelt wanted to make the government boss people around because he couldn't use his legs:

Shlaes, in a bold stroke of psychologizing, lays the hyperactivity to “the restlessness of the invalid.” She goes on, “Like an invalid, the country took pleasure in the very thought of motion.” More ominous was Roosevelt’s totalitarian tendency: “His remedies were on a greater scale and often inspired by socialist or fascist models abroad.”

Updike watches Shlaes make the claim that that communist Roosevelt hired other commies as New Dealers:

One of Shlaes’s chapter-length detours deals with a junket... to investigate and report on conditions in the Soviet Union.... [T]he economic commentator Stuart Chase.... Stuart Chase upon his return wrote, “Laissez-faire rides well on covered wagons, not so well on conveyor belts and cement roads.” Collectivism was the inevitable direction. After all, Chase wrote, “why should Russians have all the fun remaking a world?” The poisoned chalice was passed around...

But then she doesn't:

But “few New Dealers were spies or even communists,” she reassures the reader....

At the end of his review, Updike tries to fight back:

[T]he Depression slogged on, ending only in 1940, as the government decisively hiked defense spending.... My father had been reared a Republican, but he switched parties to vote for Roosevelt.... The impression of recovery-—the impression that a President was bending the old rules and, drawing upon his own courage and flamboyance in adversity and illness, stirring things up on behalf of the down-and-out—mattered more than any miscalculations in the moot mathematics of economics. Business, of which Shlaes is so solicitous, is basically merciless.... Government is ultimately a human transaction, and Roosevelt put a cheerful, defiant, caring face on government at a time when faith in democracy was ebbing throughout the Western world. For this inspirational feat he is the twentieth century’s greatest President, to rank with Lincoln and Washington as symbolic figures for a nation to live by.

A better New Yorker editor would have chosen a reviewer who at least knew what an aggregate demand curve was. Here's my take:

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/arnold_kling_vs.html: I, at least, think that as far as recovery was concerned the macroeconomic good done by the New Deal vastly outweighed the structural bad. Any reasonable counterfactual involving no New Deal that I can see has things a good deal worse in the middle and late 1930s than they were in our reality.

But there is an argument to be made that an even better New Deal would have been possible, and ought to have been attainable.

Had Milton Friedman been special assistant to and whispering in the ear of Fed Chair Marriner Eccles in 1936-1938, he would have successfully headed off Eccles's boneheaded idea of raising reserve requirements on banks. Then the late 1930s would have been a much happier time. Had FDR given his baton in 1933 to trustbuster Thurman Arnold rather than to cartelizer Hugh Johnson and had the initial round of the New Deal increased rather than decreased the degree of competition in the American economy, then... well, the neoclassical part of my brain thinks that 1934 and 1935 would have been somewhat happier--but the Fundie Keynesian part of my brain thinks that Hugh Johnson's NRA was irrelevant because aggregate demand was a much bigger problem then than aggregate supply....

The New Deal essentially dusted off and implemented the unsuccessful Progressive Era program for the reform of American finance that had been pushed by the likes of Louis Brandeis during the 1900s and the 1910s. And Louis Brandeis was definitely on the side of the upwardly-mobile and the smart and technically competent, as opposed to the side of old wealth and new thrift.... Financial markets function well for the economy only when they do a good job of seeking out and transmitting information.... This requires that people be incentivized to seek out and uncover important pieces of information by being able to profit handsomely from doing so--which requires that there be a bright visible line between what you can do and what you can't, between legitimate research and illegitimate insider trading. The SEC as born in the New Deal has always found it relatively difficult to draw such a bright visible line....

[On the other hand] financial markets also function well only when they mobilize great masses of savings from scattered individuals by giving them confidence that their investments are liquid in that they can be bought and sold at a fair price.... Smart financial regulation attains a point of balance. There is... a general worry that the system the New Deal has left us pays too much attention to the desirability of a level playing field for buyers and sellers, and not enough to the desirability of having truly informed buyers and sellers....

[L]et's not lose sight of the fact that even badly-handled as it was, really-existing deposit insurance [implemented during the New Deal] was a mammoth improvement over no deposit insurance at all. I think that that is a good thumbnail summary of the entire New Deal: badly-handled, but a vast improvement over the preceding system and over the politically-viable alternatives--with the exception, I would argue, of Agriculture Support and the NRA, which did little if any good at immense long-run cost...

Ben Bernanke's analysis of the role played by unstemmed financial panics, industrial bankruptcies, and bank closings is Ben Bernanke (1983), "Nonmonetary Effects of the Financial Crisis in the Propagation of the Great Depression," American Economic Review, 73, (June) pp. 257-76 at google scholar >http://scholar.google.com/scholar?num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&client=safari&q=Nonmonetary+Effects+of+the+Financial+Crisis+in+the+Propagation+of+the+Great+Depression&btnG=Search>. Ben has a nice speech about money, gold, and the Great Depression http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2004/200403022/default.htm.

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